Alex Bernadotte arrived at Dartmouth College for her freshman year with a 10-car caravan of proud family members and wrong-size sheets for her college dorm bed.

“We didn’t get the memo that you needed extra-long bed sheets,” said Bernadotte, the first in her family to attend college.

She soon realized she didn’t get a lot of those kinds of memos.

“I had no idea what was coming,” she said. “None whatsoever.”

As a high school student who never saw a grade below a B, Bernadotte was stunned as she started to rack up failing grades on her college tests, a downward spiral that lasted through her freshman year.

Her experience — a heartbreaking journey with a happy ending — drove her to create Beyond 12, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland devoted to college students like her, students who make it into college but face overwhelming challenges and failure once they get there.

“There are 700,000 to 900,000 students with backgrounds and stories similar to mine going each year, and the vast majority are not going to graduate,” she said. Only 9 percent of young people in the poorest families will graduate college by their mid-20s, she said, compared with 77 percent of those in the highest income bracket.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

It means there are too many students who get those coveted college acceptance letters only to wash out once they get there.

“Think about the lost potential,” said Bernadotte, 48. “We have a responsibility to ensure they succeed.”

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Because of her efforts to help first-generation college students earn their degrees, Bernadotte is a nominee for the The Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year, an annual recognition of Bay Area leaders whose work improves the world.

Born in Haiti, Bernadotte moved to the United States at age 7, joining her parents, who had left their infant daughter with her grandmother in search of a better future for their family in Boston.

Her father worked in a window factory and her mother as a blood technician.

“They knew they had to make a better life,” she said. “And for them, honoring their sacrifice meant I had to go to college.”

Bernadotte remembers the day her mother came home, describing a conversation among doctors talking about the Ivy League and Dartmouth College, deciding on the spot that it was where her daughter should go.

If it was where doctors send their children, it would be where she would send hers. Bernadotte applied to Dartmouth sight unseen, among other institutions.

“I still remember when those acceptances came in and we thought we won the lottery,” she said. “This is what the dream had been all about.”

The short sheets were the first clue that the dream would soon become more of a nightmare.

Bernadotte had thrived in an all-girls Catholic high school, but she realized in her first days at Dartmouth that she was prepared to navigate neither the bureaucracy nor the academic rigor she would soon face.

“If you haven't been, I mean it’s literally like you're entering a foreign world,” she said about jumping from high school to college life.

Over the next year, she failed classes, including calculus and genetics, and landed on academic probation. University officials told her she needed to take a year off.

Arriving home and telling her parents she couldn’t go back was gut-wrenching, Bernadotte said.

“For 17 years we focused on getting in and had never really talked about what happens after,” she said. “I completely bombed my freshman year, academically, socially, emotionally, financially, I think every sense of the word.”

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VisionSF Nominee

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Instead of giving up, Bernadotte returned to Dartmouth a year later with a game plan, ditching her idea of becoming a doctor and switching to sociology. She visited professors during office hours, found a mentor and talked to peers who told her she wasn’t alone.

About VisionSF

This is one of six profiles of finalists for The Chronicle’s fifth annual Visionary of the Year award. The honor salutes leaders who strive to make the world a better place and drive social and economic change by employing new, innovative business models and practices. The finalists were selected by a nominating committee that included Daniel Lurie, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Tipping Point Community; John Diaz, editorial page editor of The Chronicle; London Breed, mayor of San Francisco; Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose; Libby Schaaf, mayor of Oakland; Charlotte Shultz, chief of protocol for the city and county of San Francisco; and George Shultz, former U.S. secretary of state.

Chronicle Publisher Bill Nagel, Editor in Chief Audrey Cooper and Diaz will select the winner, whose name will be announced March 27.

“I thought it was just me,” she said.

She graduated in four years, despite the year off.

Bernadotte went on to earn a master’s degree in education policy at Stanford University and then work for the New Schools Venture Fund, which invests in education reform efforts and entrepreneurs.

She started questioning what she could have done differently in college — and what Dartmouth could have done differently to help her succeed.

Those questions and the subsequent answers led to the founding of Beyond 12 in 2010.

To succeed in college, first-generation college students need help navigating the college bureaucracy — from registration to finances — as well as any emotional and academic hurdles, Bernadotte said.

That’s where Beyond 12 comes in, assigning individual coaches to college students who stay in regular communication via text, phone, email, social media and video conferencing.

In addition, the organization uses artificial intelligence technology to predict when a student will need help and prescribe the right kind of support. That could mean alerting students to the university’s deadline for adding or dropping courses or when they need to apply for housing or financial aid.

The organization is one of many nonprofits within the education arena working to increase the number of students making it through college, said Daniel Lurie, founder and chief executive of Tipping Point Community, a Bay Area nonprofit that supports efforts to fight poverty.

But Beyond 12 is special, with a founder who has specific and personal knowledge of the needs of first-generation college students, he said.

“She’s one of those people who deliver good intentions and more results,” said Lurie, who nominated Bernadotte for the Visionary award. “If we could hear more voices like hers, we’d be further along in getting this right and understanding all the supports we need to surround students who are all super-talented.”

In addition to providing student support, Bernadotte and her staff are working with colleges to help them better meet the needs of students most likely to fail or drop out, providing feedback to university officials based on what kinds of problems or barriers students are experiencing most frequently.

The organization tracks tens of thousands of students from high school through college, to get data on how many are succeeding and when and why others fail.

Too often the measure of success for schools or organizations is determined by the number of kids who get into college rather than the number who actually make it through, Bernadotte said.

So far, Beyond 12 has coached 7,000 students and tracked more than 100,000 during their college years.

Currently, its coaches — who are recent first-generation college graduates — are working with 2,000 students at 180 universities.

The goal, Bernadotte said, is to be coaching 1 million students each year by 2025 — using one-on-one coaching and automated support.

“A college degree is still the credential of opportunity in our society,” she said. “It is a proven path out of poverty.”

Of the freshman college students Beyond 12 started coaching in fall 2011, 82 percent made it to their fourth year of college, compared with 59 percent of other first-generation college students across the country.

“We now know that just getting kids to college is not enough,” Lurie said. “It’s a real problem for this country, and I think Alex is really on to something.”